What's in the Box? The 3G iPhone Lands Down Under — What's in the Box? — The 3G iPhone Lands Down Under? — Late yesterday afternoon MacTalk received the above photo from a very reliable source who can not be named for obvious reasons (fear of assassination by the Apple Secret Police I presume).

A proposal for Twitter: Shut it down — As I write this, Amazon.com, like Twitter, is offline. Amazon's outage is the big news Friday morning. But what of Twitter? — I used to love Twitter. But the site's pogo status—it's up! it's down! it's up again!—is driving me away.

3G iPhone firmware leaked: tri-band HSDPA and GPS are go — It's easy to take for granted the 3G iPhone's launch at this point. After all, Steve said it was “coming later this year,” as did a number of prominent mobile executives. And then there's been the barrage of carrier announcements …

R.I.P. SanDisk's TakeTV, Fanfare Shut Down — TakeTV, we hardly knew ye. Unveiled just last October, SanDisk's USB PC-to-TV video device along with Fanfare, its accompanying content portal, were both shut down on May 15th, a SanDisk spokesperson has confirmed.

Silverlight 2 Beta 2 arrives on time, available now (Updated) — As promised by Bill Gates earlier this week, Microsoft has now released Silverlight 2 Beta 2 as a 4.66MB download. The Silverlight homepage does not yet have the new download links, but as things change (like the Mac installer being posted), this post will be updated.

Ballmer Tells the Washington Post That Print is Toast — Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer sat down for lunch with editors and reporters at the Washington Post and told them print will be dead in ten years: … I just hope the Post's Website will still be around because it is a great distribution partner for TechCrunch.

Bits, Bands and Books — Do you remember what it was like back in the old days when we had a New Economy? In the 1990s, jobs were abundant, oil was cheap and information technology was about to change everything. — Then the technology bubble popped. Many highly touted New Economy companies …

Amazon suffers U.S. outage on Friday — Amazon.com has been inaccessible to many U.S. visitors since at least 10:30 a.m. PDT on Friday. — “Http/1.1 Service Unavailable” was the message that appeared when Amazon customers across the country attempted to log on.

The Evolution of Pre-Launch Gmail In Screenshots — When visiting Google yesterday for the unveiling of Gmail Labs, product manager Keith Coleman took us on a tour of the Googleplex's Building 47. — Along the way, we saw Googlers hard at work on Gmail, Reader, Calendar, and other related projects.

Nvidia, AMD vie with Intel over USB 3.0 — AMD and Nvidia aim to wrest control of a crucial PC specification from Intel, arguing that the chip giant is trying to box them out as they move to a new era of faster peripherals. — In play is the USB 3.0 specification, a next-generation high-speed connection standard due in 2009.

1938 Media And c|net Announcement — Yeah, I know it's crazy. Live in a few weeks. — UPDATE: To reiterate what I say on the video for the apparent dopes out there. — We were not acquired by cnet. — I will be writing a column there and 1938 Media will produce 1 video a week for them.

Hey Firefox - Let Us Pick Our Own Search Engine! — So Firefox 3 has a new release candidate making news, suggesting that the browser is nearly done. May I suggest that the browser is nowhere near being done until the Mozilla Foundation drops its favoritism to Google and allow users to pick their own default search engine?

Warner Music (WMG) Pulls Out Of Last.fm (CBS) — Warner Music Group (WMG) has pulled its catalog out of Last.fm's “on demand” free streaming service, which the CBS-owned service launched to great fanfare in January. Users can still hear Warner artists via the site's “radio” option, which doesn't allow you to select individual songs.